German Scientists Create Lithium Ion Battery that Can Charge an Electric Car for 27 Years


I've been saying for several years: If we don't lead the world in the production of clean, renewable energy, some other country will do so, and then we'll be in REAL TROUBLE.

Yep.

Even Saudi Arabia is moving forward with solar.

But they'll export the oil.



http://www.arabianbusiness.com/saudi-ar ... 02687.html

Anyone thats still backing oil at this point is an idiot. Oil is a wonderful product and the last thing we should be is burning it. The Saudis like the Chinese have had 1000s of years more practice at being evil, they know which way the wind is blowing.

We have fallen behind China, Europe and even some small countries that are leaping ahead in spite of austerity and loss of subsidies due to the meltdown. But there are plenty of people like Warren Buffet who are shifting large sums of capital from traditional energy to the alternatives particularly solar. The natural gas bubble is just that. When that bubble moves through the pipeline and out of the system, gas will be increasingly more expensive to get out of the ground and the damage to the environment will become more apparent and more critical. I don't know what it will take to get the RW climate change deniers to move off their suppression of solar in this country and their insistence that solar not get the kind of subsidies and tax breaks that the oil companies have been getting from the beginning. My theory is that it will not happen until the oil companies own a controlling interest in the major solar players. Towit, Total just increased its interest in Sunpower from 66% to nearly 70%. That the largest ownership I know of. Some of the others have been acquiring solar companies but nothing I know like this one. This is also the one that Warren Buffet put a billion dollars into.

The big bottleneck has been storage. If this battery is what the article says, we should be hearing from Tesla and Solar City pretty soon. There was a really strong effort to suppress the solar companies and bankrupt the Chinese companies....in addition to the market pressures from the meltdown, oversupply of panels and lack of funding for consumers. If governments had followed the model of Berkeley and made loans available to anyone who wanted solar, we would be way, way ahead of where we are not. The demand is there and it's busting out of it's laces. It will not be long before solar panels will be everywhere if homeowners can afford the start up fees and expenses. The installers have been very, very busy both here and abroad. From the right.....all they can say is 'Solyndra!"

I really don't understand that statement. It seems that we have all been on this earth about the same amount of time and our level of practice at being evil and everything else is pretty much the same. In fact, exactly the same. I am pretty sure I am descended from Mongolians/Manchurians who got around a lot earlier and a lot more than they are usually credited with......and I am fairly sure some of them came through the Middle East.

As for the Saudi tribe itself, it is considered quite backward among the more advanced Arab tribes as the true Saudi's are the nomads in the desert not those from Mesopotamia which my history books called the' Cradle of Civilization.' You know, the ones from whom we got all that stuff that makes us civilized. There might have been some remote Northern Islands that were reached rather late, though.

Sounds promising but what will it cost to make? That it works is all well and good but it also needs to be cost competitive with the alternatives and profitable. There are lots of things that work that are not made and sold because they are not profitable.

Here's an evaluation of what the equivalent is for an EV as compared to gas prices. One has to consider thwe we pay the highest retail prices for electricity in the country. Also, the highest gasoline prices as well.

http://blog.sfgate.com/energy/2013/06/1 ... 1-for-gas/

What we really need is a way to store the solar energy.

FIFY.

Yeah, I know you already knew that, Suranis...jes sayin'.